FreeOrion

About colonization: it is very hard to colonize a new planet, in the beginning, because of the large amount of resources needed to build a colony module. I imagine that it becomes quite easy to build one when the empire is large.
This is closely related to the "slow start" issue. Instead of giving the player a lot of colony ships at the first turn, I suggest one idea.
Instead of having one colony module, more than one could exist. Colony module I could bring 0.1 unit of population (for example) and be cheap.
Colony module II could bring 0.5 and be more expensive etc..
In this way colonization could be a lot faster, and empires could colonize accordingly to their industrial capacity, but still able to colonize even if small.

I wonder if the same effect can be obtained with the "outpost module". Or maybe the outpost module could be the first, cheap technology to discover, and the first module to colonize, followed later by larger and more expensive modules.

I think perhaps colony ships simply need to be cheaper.

Building a colony with a fractional unit of population would tend to be frustrating, the already slow colony growth would start out even slower. It's not much of an improvement if you can plant colonies more quickly, but they are too small to do anything useful for a long time.

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Yes, make it cheaper(a tenth or less of the current price) and add the Cryonic Colony Pod, which is supposed to bring more people to a new planet.